Portland has a new tiki bar! Yesterday afternoon Meredith emailed me a note mentioning the opening of Thatch on NE Broadway. I don’t know how the development of the place managed to fly under my radar, but apparently the owner has been working on this place for months. According to rumors on Tiki Central, much of the décor comes courtesy of the old Jasmine Tree. I think the booth seating was salvaged from an old Denny’s.

So of course I went to the opening last night. Tony, bless his heart, volunteered to join. It was pretty crowded, but we managed to find seats at the child height bar. Unfortunately, the drink selection was limited to Mai Tais, Blue Hawaiians, and Daiquiris – but the bartender assured us they would be offering a wide range of exotic drinks in the near future. The true test of a tiki bar is their Mai Tai. I’m happy to report the Mai Tais at Thatch are in the tradition of Trader Vics and are quite good. Apparently, they make a lot of their ingredients from scratch, like the syrup, so they should have fantastic drinks when they really get up and running.

But what about the tikis, you might ask? Well, Thatch has quantity, quality, and diversity covered. There are some digital pictures below I took last night, so that should give you a taste of the tiki goodness going on there. Thatch occupies a pretty small space, but the owner managed to stuff a fair number of tikis into the bar without it becoming overly cluttered.

If folks are thinking about visiting Thatch, I’d recommended waiting about a week or two. The staff is still trying to get everything sorted out, so they don’t really have much in the way of drinks and I have no idea if they’ll be offering food. And they don’t even have a credit card machine yet!

Here are some photos of Thatch’s development from the Tiki Central forum